Once, in the Cold War’s long twilight, we dreamt beneath the weight of satellites and the hum of televisions whispering warnings. The sky, split by contrails and doubt, transformed neighbors into suspects and silence into danger. We pressed red buttons in our nightmares, and woke with mushroom clouds behind our eyes.
And now, again, the air thickens. The glow comes not from fallout, but from small phone screens. We scan and scroll, praying inside for forward motion…anything to prove we’re still alive, while the machine ticks on.
Workers, the new single from Brooklyn’s Observation Room, carries that same electric anxiety. It pulses with factory rhythm and the chill of repetition. It does what great songs once did: wraps the dread in melody, gives the fear a face, then dares us to dance.
Formed by Marina F while drifting from the stillness of Maine’s woods to the relentless rhythm of New York City, Observation Room trades punk’s jagged thrash for synth-pop’s measured pulse. With the addition of Chloe Olson, bringing bass, synth, and vocal harmonies. the project deepens into something precise and prismatic, threaded with the quiet tension of modern unease.
Workers hums with sterile menace, an ’80s industrial heartbeat locked in glistening circuitry. Synths slice like scalpels, chant-like vocals drone with ritual urgency, and the rhythm clicks forward like machinery too old to question. Think Book of Love’s crystalline sweetness colliding with early Depeche Mode’s stern machinery, Human League’s clipped minimalism, and the sideways charm of the Thompson Twins, as well as the stylish pop groove of Book of Love. The result is sound suspended, caught somewhere between faded nostalgia and present-day paranoia. A hymn for those caught in cycles too vast to name.
Their debut gleams like polished chrome, refracting Reagan-era illusions into today’s digital dread. Observation Room sounds both factory-born and bedroom-forged: mechanical yet tender, cold steel touched by human breath.
Listen to Workers below and pre-order their debut EP Self Titled (out 11 July via à La Carte Records) here.
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Featured photo by Kevin Daniel
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